First Posted: 12/9/2013
My guess is the presents have already been unwrapped; the eggnog prepared and probably drunk; in some families, the movie for later in the day already selected at Regal Cinema; and in my family, the homemade clam chowder served, a tradition begun by my father and passed on to me.
In other words, today is a day so inexorably tied to traditions that I remember from so long ago, and that makes today a very special day on a level that stands apart from the obvious religious significance.
I think it really dawned on me at the end of October just how many traditions have eroded in our lives. The Halloween that I remember from years ago, not just during my childhood but during my daughters’ childhoods, is certainly not what it once was. What once was a full night of revelry, mixed in with a little mischief, now has shrunk to just two hours, and this year’s rescheduled event was even in the afternoon.
Then, less than a month later, tradition took another hit. Thanks to the same greed that saw the demise of the doubleheaders that used to dominate the schedules of the Major League Baseball teams of my youth, I witnessed the erosion of both the traditions of Thanksgiving and also of the Black Friday holiday shopping kickoff on the day after the holiday.
This year, we all witnessed a number of stores that decided to encroach on the sanctity of a day that’s supposed to be reserved for the three F’s — family, food and football. And, while I know that there are those who serve us so proudly in far-away places whose Thanksgiving Day doesn’t not line up that way and, for years, there have been those whose jobs in medical fields and law enforcement and other vital services make a traditional Thanksgiving impossible, the last time I checked, such vital services don’t include retail workers.
Listen, part of the charm of the Thanksgiving Day tradition has always been the cessation of those other often-mundane traditions, school and work, that most of us attend to each day during the traditional work week The day and, for many, the Friday after, was sort of a mini-weekend bleeding right into an actual weekend, providing us a nice little November hiatus.
However, no such mini-weekend was possible last month for those who work in many retailers. On that list of stores that couldn’t wait just a few hours to sell their wares to holiday shoppers and threw their doors open on Thanksgiving itself were Kmart, Meijer, Wal-Mart, Toys ‘R Us, JCPenney, Elder-Beerman and Kohl’s.
Rick Evans, a Kohl’s employee, no doubt is wont to complain about his employer’s incursion on his holiday, so he put a somewhat happy face on going in.
“Kohl’s does a nice job making it tolerable working that day,” he said. They bring in plenty of food, like Tim Horton’s donuts and Subway sandwiches and such, so that’s nice.”
However, the stores that couldn’t wait and jumped the gun and enticed shoppers out on Thanksgiving also not only violated the tranquility of a traditional holiday, but they also helped to erode the tradition shared by a lot of folks, especially moms and daughters, of rising early on Black Friday, bundling up and hopping around in lively fashion outside locked doors awaiting the Friday 6 a.m. opening to grab those door-buster deals.
While our economic analysts hoped that stores would at least respect the 8 p.m. Thanksgiving barrier that most followed prior to this year, some decided to wind the clock backwards to 6 p.m. and even earlier.
And, while retailers’ attempts at “winning Black Friday” by opening on Thanksgiving was intended to hedge against forecasts that holiday shopping wouldn’t be that great this year, in a bit of a rhetorical twist on one of today’s most overused expressions, when it comes to any holiday shopping season, “It will be what it will be.”
In the mind of this former retail worker years ago at Butler Shoes in the Lima Mall, back when there was a Butler and back when there was a fountain immediately southeast of it, I don’t think violating a holiday and also altering the Black Friday tradition helps.
If anything, asking employees to give up their holidays and intruding on shoppers’ holidays may very well have done more harm than good at the register. There’s a part of me that hopes so, although my natural inclination is to root for anything that helps the economy.
However, when our culture moves in any direction that chips away at pleasant traditions, ones that connect us to our past and conjure memories of those once part of our pasts, there’s more than a little sadness.
Traditions give our lives order, a sense of constancy that tells us that while there’s so much we can’t control, there are some things that define us and some things that make the expression “family of man” mean something.
And, for all of us, that’s why today matters so very much. Embrace it, and, to all, Merry Christmas.
